and so the retail christmas season . . . begins

[kindkit]

1) I had a pretty good Thanksgiving, in the sense of having a day off and eating lots of chicken and mashed potatoes.

2) I survived Black Friday and then had Saturday and today off, making up for last weekend's non-weekend. I had to come out of my usual workplace hidey-hole for a few hours on Friday to help customers, but it wasn't too bad. There was a weird moment about halfway through the day of realizing that, while we at the store have been preparing for Black Friday for weeks, this is actually the beginning of the Christmas retail season and not the end. There's still a month of escalating madness to go.



3) The pumpkin roll I brought to work cracked badly upon unrolling, filling, and re-rolling, but people liked it anyway. And the bread was an unexpected hit. Apparently all those baking books that tell you people are hungry for good bread with some substance are right. (I made Paul Hollywood's eight-strand plaited loaf again. I used his recipe but refrigerated the dough overnight to give it some flavor. So it wasn't a loaf with the serious heft of, say, a seeded rye, but still worlds away from weird fluffy insubstantial supermarket bread).

4) The first two seasons of Hannibal were on sale cheap on Black Friday, so I'm now prepared for the post-Christmas Hannibal watchalong that halotolerant and I are planning. (I haven't seen the show yet, so no spoilers please!)

5) I've been living off of Thanksgiving leftovers, although because I cooked a chicken and not a turkey, I'm coming to the end of those except for the chicken bones. But I have done a bit of baking. Yesterday I made mini apple pies, which seem to have turned out okay despite some difficulties. I used Rose Levy Beranbaum's pastry recipe, forgetting that while it makes a very flaky pastry, I have to add at least twice the amount of liquid she calls for to get a dough that doesn't just crumble to pieces as you roll it. So I had to add more liquid at an awkward stage, and then I still didn't add enough to in the bottom crust (I added more afterwards to the dough for the top crust) so that it wouldn't roll out thinly. Also I cleverly decided to save some work by chopping the apples in the food processor--the result was of course grated apples. But the pies are edible if imperfect, and the pastry still came out ridiculously flaky despite everything--the top crust looks almost like puff pastry!

Also yesterday I started some dough for a supposedly-Scottish oatmeal bread with allspice, nutmeg, and raisins. I seldom bake sweet, spiced, fruit-filled breads because they're not very versatile, but I felt like a change. The loaf should be ready for the oven in about an hour.

6) I finally watched Age of Ultron and enjoyed it quite a lot, unlike almost everyone else apparently. I grant that there are a lot of plot details that don't make sense, but I expect a certain level of nonsense from action movies. What I didn't expect, but liked, was the sense of fallibility and melancholy throughout.

7) I've been reading Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins book series, which are paranormal-ish mysteries starring a young female Anglican priest who ends up becoming the diocesan Deliverance minister, aka exorcist. There is much about them I don't like, starting with the premise that there is pure inhuman evil loose in the world and that Christianity is the main or possibly only force holding it at bay; this is an obviously, deeply, inevitably conservative worldview despite Watkins' supposed liberalism. The second book featured Satanists operating behind a new age front, which only just kept itself out of pure right-wing evangelical fantasy territory by including some token good new agers. The first book, meanwhile, managed to be homophobic despite the protagonist worrying at length that she was being homophobic and trying not to be; to be fair, this book was published in 1998, which in terms of queer representation is a loooong time ago, so maybe the more recent books are better.

In short, the books annoy the crap out of me, and yet I keep reading them because there's enough interesting stuff and appealing characters to hook me.

I wish I could find a mystery series I loved as much, or even approximately as much, as I loved Dalziel and Pascoe. Unfortunately there just aren't many writers like Reginald Hill.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I've never found a crime writer as good as Reginald Hill, either. Which is your favourite? I think Pictures of Perfection is mine as it's my all-time comfort read, but the whole run between Deadheads and On Beulah Height is pretty much flawless.

[kindkit]

the whole run between Deadheads and On Beulah Height is pretty much flawless

I almost entirely agree. The only book in there that I don't adore is Recalled to Life, because for some reason when Hill gets into spy stuff it never quite works for me. (I like other spy novels, or at least I like John Le Carré, but I feel like Hill often gets overinvested in the spy plot and loses track of characterization.) But even Recalled to Life is far from bad, and it has some moments I like a lot.

I find it hard to pick a favorite. I love the Pascoe-centered ones, such as Underworld and The Wood Beyond; then again, I adore Wield's story (though I have to admit that his relationship with Edwin Digweed strains plausibility for me, because their personalities are so different). If I had to pick, it would probably be On Beulah Height, which was the first Dalziel and Pascoe novel I ever read. The gut-wrenching tragedy of it is devastating, and the ending, as they're climbing the hill, still haunts me. And it contains probably my single favorite character moment, when Peter in the hospital literally runs down the stairs into Wield's arms. (I ship them, I confess, but I also really love their canonical friendship, and I love how their deep, deep affection for each other comes out in this moment when Rosie's illness has knocked away all the conditioning that keeps male friends from showing their feelings.)

[(Anonymous)]

You know, I always completely forget about Recalled to Life, which shows that it didn't make much of an impression on me! I love spy fiction but agree that Hill was much, much better when he stayed well away from it.

I like Pascoe's story a lot too. I always find that he gets a bit of a rough deal (from reviewers and from the television series, which I hated) as he tends to be seen as the bland straight man. Actually, he's much more interesting (and in some ways much less "nice") than that. I love his friendship with Wield too, so much so that I can never 100 per cent wholeheartedly bring myself to ship them, tempting though it is! I'm actually struggling to think of many other good friendships in fiction between gay men and straight men, so I always really appreciated that aspect of the books.

Yes, Edwin is a bit of a problem, even though he's a perfectly good character by himself. He's miles away from Wield's usual type as established in canon, and it's hard to buy that Wield has suddenly fallen for someone so different from his usual type when Hill is so terribly coy about the sexual and romantic elements of their relationship. I actually think there's just about enough in the books to make me buy the attraction on Edwin's side, just not enough to make me confident that it's reciprocated (as opposed to Wield just settling for companionship and a nice cottage in the country because he doesn't think he can do better, which would make me very sad indeed).

[kindkit]

It's weird to me that anyone could see Pascoe as bland. I think he's hugely complex, and, yes, not always nice, though he tries to be good (and sometimes, naturally, fails). But he's got a kind of reserved, outwardly controlled personality, with all his turmoil hidden away--even from himself sometimes--and I suppose it's inevitable that some people will read that as blandness, especially in comparison with Dalziel's huge brash personality or Wield's more obvious conflicts.

I agree about the uniqueness of Pascoe and Wield's friendship--I can't think of another media example of close friendship between a gay man and a straight man. I can't help shipping them, though, even though it would be pretty fraught because I think Peter is mostly straight. (But maybe not entirely straight? There's a bit in one of the books--I think it might be Dialogues of the Dead--where Peter notices that Wield's body is like a Greek statue.)

Oh, I hate to think of Wield settling for Edwin. It's heartbreaking, though I see your point, and it does seem like Edwin is the first man Wield has meet since Maurice who is at all relationship material. The only way I can make sense of Wield's attraction, given as you said his canonical taste for younger men who need saving, is that Edwin in some ways reminds him of Peter Pascoe. Their personalities are dissimilar, but Edwin has Peter's educated/cultured quality, his bookishness and so on, and I can see these being things Wield has learned to value because he values Peter, even though he's not interested in books and music himself. And I think he likes Edwin's bitchiness, because he spent so much of his life biting his tongue and not expressing anything. Still, even with effort I find it hard to see it as a successful, lasting relationship. My sense is that Hill was determined to give Wield a happy ending, and since he determined to do so in a Jane Austen pastiche, there had to be initial dislike and snarky comments and so on, even though Wield is about the furthest person imaginable from Lizzie Bennet.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I like that theory, and actually I think it does help make that relationship more convincing. I'm really wishing I had my copy of Pictures of Perfection in front of me because I have a vague recollection that Wield shows very subtle signs, if not of warming to Edwin, then at least of finding him a bit more interesting after he's watched him face off with Pascoe over quotations and then seen Pascoe's delighted reaction to the bookshop. So I can buy that he starts to see a resemblance on some level over the course of the novel, and finds it attractive without being able to admit to himself that he finds it attractive.